Many African dishes, particularly soups and stews, are eaten with Rice (or some other starchy staple). These Congo Cookbook “Rice” dishes are made with rice as the primary ingredient. Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) is truly an ancient food crop, known to have been cultivated and consumed over 7,000 years ago. Both Malayo-Polynesian colonizers from the Pacific Ocean islands, and Arab-Persian colonizers and traders from the Middle East brought Asian Rice to Africa’s eastern coast in ancient times. It is not widely known that there are species of rice native to Africa that were cultivated in ancient times in the Western and Central interior parts of the continent before the arrival of Asian Rice. This indigenous variety, African Rice (Oryza glaberrima), sometimes called African Red Rice, has been mostly abandoned by farmers and consumers in favor of the Asian varieties, much of it imported.